Packing, Preparation, and Panic

Like any woman, I love to come home from a trip to a clean house. I had this great idea to clean the carpet in our family room since it's right off the garage and is pretty grimy. I borrowed our friends Bissell Steam Vac and was all set to do it a week before we left. It just so happened that day James got sick and was throwing up. I thought the chances were pretty good Harrison would get sick (he never did) and would get the carpet so I put it off until Saturday. The day rolled around and I was all set to clean the carpet. They boys were in bed and I had pretreated all the stains and then the machine wouldn't suction anything! Jeff and I flipped switches and levers and nothing worked so we called our friend who came over to take a look. After disassembling the entire thing, they found the pump was out so we were stuck with sticky pretreated carpet on a Saturday night. I was starting to get a bit panicky wondering when I would have time to finish this project!

After a shout out to an email group of mine I found a machine to borrow on Monday (Memorial Day). We got a late start because Jeff was assembling a new foyer table (see story below) and ended up cleaning carpet until late into the night. Probably not what we should have been doing two days before a huge vacation.

About the table...it has been a dream of mine to have a table in our foyer and I actually found one I loved after years of searching but it was out of my budget. I had been watching for a sale and it finally went to 50% off, two days before our big vacation. What are the chances? After my loving husband agreed to add this to our list of errands for the day we brought it home and he started putting it together for me.

It also just so happened Jeff's parents were getting new furniture and offered to give us their old leather couch, chair and ottoman. They decided to do it before we left to the beach so all this moving took place Monday morning as well.

I couldn't stand that our garden was full of tiny weeds so I took time Monday morning to go out and hoe the entire garden and even re-seed some of the corn that didn't come in. We are only growing 2 rows of corn and a bunch of pumpkin plants since we really won't be around to harvest anything else. I took a picture since the garden would definitely not be free of weeds when we return.
These were all not the things we should have been doing two days before our departure considering the massive amount of packing and organizing we had left. But now we have a beautifully furnished, clean house!